BirdWatchers

All started with a panoramic photo that I took on a foggy morning of my daily drives after the struggle to decide what to do in Unreal that doesn't look like more of the same: ultra photorealistic landscapes where the only task that you need to do is download a bunch of assets from Quixel Megascans and have a good eye populating and scattering vegetation in a large portions of landscape with PCGs. Anyone can still get amazing photorealistic results doing only that but the resulting image is not gonna stand out if that's the only thing you focus on. For this image I wanted to use a real photo as a reference (that I'm providing here down below) but I didn't want to try to clone it just as a photorealism exercise like the ones we could see in the Autodesk website already 2 decades ago as a challenge to distinguish between render or photo.

Instead I wanted to do something more original, goofy and cute so the main character should be a wild animal like the warthog that I introduced in the shot. This region most famous animal is the Wild Boar but I couldn't find any of good quality. Besides the originality of the elements in the shot I also wanted to give a unique perspective to the whole image so I created an almost 2:1 frame ratio and used a very wide lens. It's extremely helpful when a whole complete image full of items and details can be started using a reference photo and in this particular case was also very convenient that I could start sculpting the road and cliffs with Nomad sculpt from the comfort of my tablet. That part of the render is really the foundation of the whole composition and I had to do several versions until feeling satisfied with the result. However, without finding the elements that are key components of this render the final image wouldn't have been possible at all within the short time of 2 weeks that took me to complete this project in my free time. The Creative Process and CCO Attributions. One of the first elements that allowed me to create realistic natural surfaces with different levels of displacement and texture variation is the layered material from Unreal Sensei... an amazing artist that also has a great training program for environment artists. You can dowload this material here. I also wanted to make sure that at least the background had very photorealistic trees but the foreground trees and the rest of elements were already using up a lot of polygons so I decided to find an HDRI that was both giving me a source of indirect lighting and a background on the far distance so this HDRI from Andreas Mischok was a perfect fit for what I was looking for. The sun was very visible so I could align my direct sun light with the position of the sun in the HDRI. The car 3D model is from Sloftm_Carz and it needs texturing but its components are very well separated and there was no need to re-organize and manage mesh separations in a different software like Blender or Maya. You can download this Citroen AMI from here. One anecdote while creating this image is that neither the warthog or the gudieposts were part of the plan when I started working but when I decided to introduce the warthog from iRahulRajput, that you can download here, I found the guidepost made by SculptEon that you can dowload from here, and I had to find some space for it before introducing the warthog.

The rest of vegetation that I used can be found in the extensive libraries of Quixel Megascans and Maxtree publishers in their corresponding sections of the fab.com store. However I tried to be accurate with most of the real local vegetation that I placed specially when it comes to different types of pines. It's been an exciting journey where I learnt lots and I went beyond the new trendy technologies of Nanite, Lumen, Layered materials, Foliage and Mesh Paint. I hope this little experiment encourages someone to experiment and create new 3D visuals!